Posts tagged with “debugging” and “c64”

The nostalgia definitely came back. With the recent re-release of the C64 emulator for iPhone I felt that I am somehow thrown back into C64 world again – the only difference is that I am twice as old as I used to be when being active on C64 demoscene and it feels a bit tight. Some time ago I bumped into this amazing ICU64 project - realtime debugging/hacking tool by Mathfigure. Do you remember Matrix the movie?

The first part

I sooooo wanted to have all that working in AS3, that I have resurrected FC64 – low level C64 emulator written by Claus Wahlers (Codeazur) with Darron Shall. The code was moved to GitHub recently, so I just had forked it and thus give it its new life.

Let's roll with a small demo.

Click to activate and watch this (very buggy here but interesting) part from Parts, great demo from 1995 by Oxyron.
Red and green indicate memory write/read, grayscale map represents memory values.
Click on the map and use mouse wheel or +/- keys to zoom in and out. (Memory debugger idea shamefully borrowed from Mathfigure.)

The demo itself doesn't play nicely with FC64 and it's quiet as there's still a lot of work to do on the emulator, but just pay attention the memory snapshot – discover how data is being populated in the memory. The image of girl's face is decompressed and overwrites BASIC area.

I am kind of quietly hoping to get other (ex-)demosceners involved to cooperate and improve FC64 as there's loads to do. The most important thing is to re-enable the SID (maybe using Ralph's TinySID alchemy port) as there are traces of early SID implementation in the FC64 source.
There's another idea for a secret project involving KickAssembler, but shhhh for now...

...and yet another part of the same story

Yes, there is more to it. I am supposed to work on the HTML/CSS templates for the new, cool (web2.0) version of Intros C64 - the biggest online C64 cracking intros repository. The design (also be me) has been approved a year ago, and I am somehow in stuck in the middle - need to work out the roadmap.

Anyway, I wrote a tiny a little bookmarklet to enable live preview of the intros, here are two example links: